Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

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I love love love Ableton Live. It's possibly my favorite piece of software today.

If you're a software engineer interested in UX, I think Live will fit your brain like a hand in glove. It reminds me very much of emacs or vi where the app is designed to disappear from view and let you focus on your content.

Also, it's incredibly programmable and generative at many many different levels:

* Session view lets you build arrangements on the fly in realtime.

* Follow actions on clips let you automatically build sequences of clips, loop, them, randomly chain them, etc. It's like control flow for clips.

* The various built-in synths and effects support all sorts of dynamic modulation to make timbres evolve on their own.

* Then, of course, there is Max4Live, a full-fledged visual programming environment integrated deeply into the app.

You, of course, can ignore all that stuff and just make completed fixed tracks. But if you're interested in the live aspects of Live, then the software really feels like a substrate that you can use to build your own bespoke instrument for playing your music in real time.

I love it so much.

I agree, and with over 15 years of experience with Live and a fruitful music career thanks to it, I have a deep respect for it. It’s hard to use anything else because of how many small, seemingly insignificant workflow features it has which add up quick in a session.

_But_ - man is it far behind the modern DAWS like Studio One and Bitwig in the low-level fundamentals like plug-in isolation, multithreading, and flexibility in terms of your ability to offload frozen tracks from RAM. This puts a bottleneck on the max size of a session before it becomes unstable and unusable. Even with 32GB RAM and a top-shelf CPU, my ability to finish a song grinds to a halt around the 100 track range. My songs can have 150 tracks with 1-20 plugins and 1-30 automation lanes per track by the time they are finished, and the number of hours I’ve lost from crashing or just waiting for it to respond could easily add up to months at this point.

And small things like the inability to know if a plug-in is the VST2 or VST3 version have been driving me nuts for over a decade.

My music is absurdly abnormal in terms of complexity though, and the vast majority of people will never encounter these problems. I worry, however, that the glacial pace of development likely due to the prehistoric tech stack at Ableton will prevent it from ever closing the growing gap made by the increasingly valuable feature sets of modern DAWs have been able to push out quickly and consistently.

Either way, Ableton Live is a great demonstration of the incredibly fine nuance involved in a good UX. They got a lot of little things right, and that alone has been the largest contributor to their success in the industry.

As a hobbyist musician even I notice Live's flaws. And while it does indeed get out of your way most of the time, when it doesn't you can't change it and it becomes frustrating. While other larger players in the industry are farther ahead, just how far behind Live really is becomes especially apparent when you look at Reaper. They're fundamentally different in their approaches, yes. But Reaper's pace for adding new features and how up-to-date they are in terms of the changing landscape of the industry (CLAP plugins, ARA2 support, etc.) is impressive considering their small team. But Ableton's focus with Live seems to be more towards adding content rather than features or large overhauls. At least that's my impression.

I genuinely love Live's workflow. It feels the most natural to me. But the ever growing list of annoyances and shortcomings make me look into other DAWs fairly frequently. Though sadly no other one has really stuck with me so far.

There was a defect in Live’s implementation of VST3’s UI that lead to poor UI performance (lag) that got fixed in the upcoming 11.3, it’s in beta test right now.

It most affected users with hundred of tracks and VSTs in most of them. No impact on VST2.

What I want to see from Bitwig is better integration with daw controllers.

I'm addicted to my ableton push... i can't move over just because of that.

I've tried the driven by moss stuff and it works great but eh... just not quite as good overall.

They just released native support for those:

Controller script added for Novation Launchpad Pro MK3 Controller script added for Novation Launchpad X (via reassigning the Rec Button) Controller script added for Novation Launchpad Mini MK3 (via the special 4th row buttons) Controller script added for Akai APC Mini MK2 Controller script added for Akai APC Key25 MK2 Controller script updated for Novation Launchpad Pro (MK1)

Wouldn't the onus be on the controller manufacturers to ensure compatibility?

Push is made by Ableton. I am not sure they are willing to help a company build by some of their ex developer who left them to build a new DAW with possibly stolen code and at least many ideas that were discussed internally.

Despite the headquarters proximity, I think they are not the best friends.

Not so sure about the "stolen" part. Bitwig code has a completely different code base (Java backend with UI written using Juce), and the sentiment at the time was that a few devs were frustrated by Ableton management rejecting several proposals that ultimately were implemented in Bitwig.

Also the multitake tracks UI that was implemented in Live 11 is basically a (slightly improved) copy of the same feature on Bitwig.

The stolen part mostly relates around the sales and distribution network, less around the code. Basically the sales equivalent of IP theft, and a really huge douche move by their CEO. Makes him very unsympathetic to me. Not as bad as Behringer but close.

I think it's the other way around, the Bitwig UI is what appears to be coded in Java.

Bitwig is extremely niche. Waiting around for controller manufacturers to implement isn't going to happen.

Ableton is great but these days I prefer Bitwig. It does most of what live does but lets you do more modular stuff without the massive context switch into Max.

I've used Ableton for about 12 years before making the switch to bitwig, it's the best thing I've ever done.

There are very, very few Ableton features that I miss. The only thing I can think of is the automations rescaling I wish Bitwig would implement, otherwise it's vastly superior to Ableton in any other way. Especially the bounce/audio editing workflow, this thing makes me 2 to 3 times faster than when using Ableton (no hyperbole)

It's also massively cheaper. For a lot of the things available on stock Bitwig (~399$, often discounted at 249$) you need Live Suite + Max 4 Live + Cycling Max MSP, the asking price is no less than 1300$.

Live main selling point right compared to Bitwig now is ubiquity, basically. You can expect to go into any recording studio, anywhere, and find a Live desk available.

I use Acid Pro 10... I think it allows me to have a more original sound to be honest. At this point I've found that tools are leveling off in terms of capability and now it's more a matter of what a producer knows how to manipulate best. There are nuances like how audio clips and knowing how built in efx work that make transitioning to a new DAW painful until you catch up, the deep learning curve is steep for advanced production... Rather than switching, I already know how my current DAW works, and it works, so there's no need to change right now.

I've always been curious about synths and how they are programmed. I'm a JS dev learning Rust and was having ideas about building my own synth. Is Max4Live a good choice for building audio plugins in 2023? Also, is Rust a viable option for creating VST plugins?

I don't think Max4Live is not a good choice for building audio plugins. It's a weird platform that was designed for 'institutionalized academic music,' as I once read someone describe it. It's difficult to program in and not efficient. None of my favorite music software is made with it. It's also quite buggy, in my experience. For doing some basic extensions to Ableton Live specifically, beyond what VST allows access to, it's OK, since it's the only official way to do so.

If you want to just dive into DSP using wires and boxes, with some additional code sprinkled in, SynthEdit or Reaktor Core are faster, more fun, and produce better results. If you don't mind C++, check out iPlug from REAPER's WDL codebase: https://www.cockos.com/wdl/ — there are some forks of it.

There's also JUCE. You'll find some people complain about it and some people regret using it, despite it being relatively popular.

There are some Rust things for doing VST (and AU) development. Here's one that I've seen a few things made with: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug/tree/master I wouldn't worry too much about the differences between C++ and Rust in this world. Audio software tends to be buggy, so the bar for being considered 'good enough' is pretty low.

Can’t edit this comment now, but the opening sentence has a typo. It should say, “I don’t think Max4Live is a good choice for building audio plugins.”

I have hated Max/MSP for at least the last 15 years. Designed for 'institutionalized academic music' made me chuckle.

Autechre's Confield album is what it is good at doing. There is nothing more to do with the software after that album.

Max and M4L have a very specific jargon and tech legacy that makes them quite different compared to regular VSTs (not better nor worse, just different). Reaktor gets closer in terms of performance and limitations to regular VST development compared to Max, while still using a visual programming approach.

Max MSP has a lot of Javascript stuff, your JS experience will be very useful with Max For Live.

Handling/touching/processing MIDI events with JavaScript in Max will mess up the timing due to how Max handles scheduling — it will defer the event to a lower priority thread — so I don't recommend doing that. You can safely use JS for GUI code and using Ableton's API to manipulate the session and UI, though.

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